


Sold Out Completely

by bethfrish



Category: The Beatles
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 11:29:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/939484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethfrish/pseuds/bethfrish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yeah, you've got that something I think you'll understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sold Out Completely

  


The part of touring that really takes its toll is not the performing, but everything in between. The performing is easy. Wade through the crowds to belt out a set that you could play in your sleep. And the fact of the matter is that none of you can be heard anyway. Not through the insufficient amplification system that cries defeat in the presence of two hundred thousand screaming girls. Which is just as well. The deafening roar of your absurd popularity drowns out Ringo's late backbeat, George's weak high notes, John's altered lyrics, and your own lazy bass line. 

No, the part of touring that wears you down over time is keeping up with your own image. The photo shoots, the interviews, the television appearances. Being witty, being charming, being fitted for new suits because you're appearing on this show at this time and Brian insists on being there this many hours early to ensure that there are no mishaps. 

One day you're trying to save up enough money to buy a guitar and then here you are, sitting in what feels like your eleventh photo shoot of the week at shit o'clock in the morning, still jetlagged because you'll never have the time to sleep it off. 

You think you all look like hell but the photographer says, _Wonderful! Excellent! Okay now, put your hands like this, Ringo please move a little closer, thank you_ , and reaches over to give George's hair a quick fluff. You smile until the muscles in your cheeks start to cramp, wishing you were asleep, or on holiday, or even in the studio where you're the one giving direction. 

Just before the last round of shots, John leans forward and pokes you in the spine. "Deepest apologies," he says through his teeth, "I let out a floater." 

Your smile is genuine this time around, though the photographer reprimands you for looking too goofy and goes to reload his camera. 

  
  
  


  


You find the States to be too vast a country. With every airport you forget more and more where you're going. Sometimes you even forget where you already are. 

In order to avoid unnecessary incidents involving fans and harassment, Brian always shuffles the four of you off to a private room to wait for your plane. Comparable to the purgatory-like atmosphere afforded by an airport, you feel caught between a world in which everyone is watching and one in which nobody lives but you and your three companions. Your family, your girlfriend; they don't fit into either one. 

You sit quietly and read the real estate section of the paper. John sits next to you, fidgeting in his economical folding chair, asking the guard repeatedly if he can light up. The answer is a firm, "No," but John replies, "Lovely. Well, Paul and I are going to take a leak. Give a call if our plane finally shows up." 

John takes your paper away and waits for you to stand up and follow. "You're very annoying sometimes," you tell him after he leads you out some back entrance and hands you a lit cigarette. "I was getting a feel for the real estate market. Some nice two bedrooms." 

"I wish our friend in there would find us some chairs with cushions," John says, leaning against the wall. "My bottom hurts. And where the fuck is our plane?" 

You smoke for a while. "So why did you make me come out here with you?" you ask him. 

"I told you, my arse needed a break. Besides, with you out here they can't board the plane and leave us behind. They might forget me, but they'd notice if you weren't there giving everyone instructions on where to sit." 

"Sod off," you laugh, and smoke some more in the silence. "You get lonely here too, right?" you ask after a while. "I mean, you miss Cyn?" 

John crushes his cigarette out beneath his shoe. "Yes and no," he says. "To either question. Were it just me, yeah, I'd probably be done in by now. I'd be bored. But then, I'd be bored at home." He inserts a cigarette between your lips and lights it, but before you can inhale a second time he takes it from you and smokes it himself. "No, I'm kind of fond of our little world. If you stick with those who keep you interested, you can't be lonely." He brings his hand to your face and returns the cigarette to your mouth. He looks at you as your lips form a tiny O against his fingers, but then Brian is there chastising you for disappearing when your plane is waiting, and you have to stub it out. 

  
  
  


  


The thing about drugs is that after a while they begin to lose their potency. The body builds up a resistance, and what was once an incredible high thins out into normalcy and nothingness. When you played in Hamburg the regular uppers stopped being enough. Every so often you would find new pills waiting for you in your rooms, ready and waiting to make your heart want to pop out of your chest. 

Your drug use has since become less frequent, but apparently the same principles hold true for sex. As young and inexperienced boys barely out of your teenaged years, the women who crowded into your rooms at night offered thrills and excitement that you valued high above your meager pay. Now when girls are sent to your hotels at night you go through the motions simply because it's easier than trying to turn them away. 

The first time you and John have sex it's like an all-nighter during those amphetamine-laced Hamburg days. George and Ringo are off at some pub with Neil, but John declines the invitation and holes up in the hotel with you and a bottle of gin. Three quarters of the way into the bottle, John rests his head in your lap and begins folding the corner of your shirt into trapezoids. John's been touchy-feely with you before, but this time is different somehow. Being worlds away from everyone and everything swells and engulfs you, and you bring you fingers to his hair, just to have something to touch. 

John sits up and regards you. You lick your lips self-consciously, and somehow the rest just falls together. The taste of gin on his mouth, fumbling at his clothing with your eyes closed, the electricity of his fingers where he slips them beneath the waistband of your trousers, where he pushes at your shoulders to press you down against the sofa. 

The thrill still courses through you the next day, so that you don't notice until much later how hungover everyone is. You don't notice how John, in a complete waste of a day off, has spent most of it staring into space. You touch his shoulder before leaving for dinner. 

"Oh," he says suddenly in response to the question you didn't ask. "I was just thinking about how I have no clean socks. Can really bum a guy out, you know." Naturally you don't believe his line about socks, but he winks at you so you pretend that you do. 

  
  
  


  


When John finally expresses his worries that boffing each other might not be in the group's best interest, you're inclined to agree. The high of the moment has long since worn off and common sense, as well as your predominant heterosexuality, have regained their place in the rational part of your brain. You go back to the girls who queue up outside your door, eager to fuck a Beatle. 

Except then it happens again. And a third time, and a fourth. Time after time you convince yourself that this is where it ends, only to catch yourself standing too close, smiling too long, thinking about it too often. 

One night you come back to your room to find a letter from Jane. It smells like that perfume she wears that you secretly detest, that invades your nostrils when you come home and it feels like you're kissing a stranger. Later you tell John, for what you decide will be the fifth and final time, that you think things should stop, before the situation gets weird. 

You expect John, for the fifth time and final time, to agree, but instead he calls you a poof and laughs tragically, "I think we're past that, mate." He looks like he's going to kiss you, but he doesn't. 

The next morning he stares moodily out the car window on the way to your interview. George and Ringo sit in the back, discussing horse races, while you quietly ponder the amount of space on either side of you. 

You touch John on the arm before you go in, but he walks past, adjusting his collar. Perhaps consequently, your share of the responses to your exclusive interview are dull and clipped, or altogether nonexistent. John manages to put his foot in his mouth, George nearly falls asleep, and afterwards Brian scolds every one of you. "Not at all on your game today," he says. "Absolute rubbish," and you trudge back to the car where you fall asleep with your head against the window. You dream that you're on tour, which you still are when you wake up. 

  
  
  


  


The irony of finally being on holiday is that the majority of the time you end up spending it with each other. You've realized that sometimes the act of going home is too jarring. There you are, back in the blasted airport, and when you get home you're forced to recount the month you've just gotten through living. You don't know at what point the center of your world fell out of whack, but it has. With every minute you spend off-kilter, it gets harder and harder to relate to those you left behind. 

You don't much care for Miami. It's hot and wet, but you don't much care for England either at the moment either. You agree to book a resort with George and John while Ringo shuffles off to Greece for a week. John makes you all go fishing, the concept of which is ridiculous after he chucks his rod into the water forty minutes into it. 

"You're not even holding it right," John tells George after George snags an old sneaker. 

"Why don't you demonstrate then? Oh wait." George taps his chin with his finger. "I seem to recall you discarded your pole somewhere at the bottom of this lake." 

"This isn't proper fishing. This is a swamp," John says. 

You cross your arms and lean against the railing. "Whose poles are these anyway?" you ask. "Or should I say _were_ they." 

George casts back into the water, perhaps in search of the sneaker's mate. "George Martin's. He may very well kill John." 

John shakes his head. "I know nothing of this missing pole. I think I heard Ringo saying he was taking it to Greece." 

"You're still holding it wrong," you tell George. 

The three of you spend the entire afternoon passing round your single pole. Nobody catches anything. George gets fidgety after a while and wanders back to the resort, but John remains calmly beside you, quiet except for the occasional muttered curse directed at the water. 

"Is it sad that we're out here fishing?" he asks you after a while, taking a drag from his cigarette. "Not fishing exactly," he clarifies, "but hiding out here, away from anyone else who happens to be alive. Seems a bit lonely, doesn't it?" 

You take his cigarette and bring it to your lips. "I feel as though we've had this conversation, or something like it." 

You can't elaborate, because the words are too hard to find. What it feels like to have your friends and family grow less and less familiar. What it means to go numb to life's simple pleasures. How it feels to have your world grow smaller and smaller, and how shocked you are to find that you've adapted to its confines. 

But John understands. He lives in your world. And maybe that's why, against all better judgment, he plucks the cigarette from your mouth and kisses you. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel wonderful. But it feels comforting, and alive. So you kiss him back. 


End file.
